In 2025, cinema, according to film critic Oleg Tundra, settled into a condition in which the industry no longer searches for a way out of crisis but searches for repetition. After the pandemic, Hollywood strikes, and streaming turmoil, film has largely stopped trying to explain the world and instead works to lower the audience’s pain threshold through familiar brands, characters, and tones.
Monopolization and platform logic
One of the year’s main developments, the article says, was the talks involving Netflix and Warner. Even without a final outcome, Netflix’s interest in acquiring a studio together with the HBO library points, in Tundra’s view, to a move toward closed ecosystems in which a film is no longer an event but a unit meant for scaling, localization, and reuse.
Against that backdrop, sequels, spin-offs, and reboots look less like a genre trend than an industrial strategy. Returns such as “Tron”, “Jurassic Park”, “Freaky Friday 2”, and “Paddington 3”, the author argues, help preserve the audience’s sense of a recognizable world even when the films themselves do not become major events.
Remakes and the loss of era-defining figures
The article also focuses on the deaths of cultural figures including David Lynch, Diane Keaton, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Claudia Cardinale, and Rob Reiner. Tundra writes that the industry’s response to the disappearance of such figures has not been to create new opportunities for younger auteurs, but to double down on continuations and remakes.
In this reading, the remakes of 2025 mainly reveal a fear of making mistakes. Older stories are rewritten to reflect new ethical norms and representation, but usually without artistic risk. As a telling example, the article cites “Snow White”, which viewers, it says, rated at 1.2 out of 10.
Where vitality remains
Tundra sees horror and hybrid horror as the liveliest area of the year, because anxiety is allowed to exist there as material in its own right. In films such as “Companion”, “Die, My Love”, “Presence”, and “Bring Her Back”, the deepest threat comes not so much from a monster as from systems of human relations, dependency, violence, and loss.
The critic also points to a rise in direct political expression, the spread of anti-capitalist rhetoric, and the return of absurdity as a way to speak about a world that no longer fits into a coherent story. In that sense, his conclusion is that 2025 was not a year of renewal, but a year of cultural anesthesia.